Then She Found Me (12 page)

I allowed myself a few bites of my sandwich, finished my potato chips. “What did you think of Bernice’s boyfriend?” I asked finally.

Dwight’s mouth was full. I waited. “Ted. A man possessed.”

“They’ve only known each other a month,” I said.

“Which means what?”

“That he’s rushing things. Putting pressure on her, proposing every day.”

“A month’s not that short a time to know someone,” said Dwight. “Besides, something tells me Bernice can handle it.”

I laughed. “Did you find her completely full of shit?”

“In an endearing sort of way.”

“You’re kidding!”

“She certainly went out of her way to be charming to me.”

I laughed. “That’s true.” And thought:
charming
.

He picked up the second sandwich and stared at it. After a few moments he asked lightly, “Has she met other friends of yours?”

“No. Why?”

Dwight automatically reached for the black plastic cup, then remembered it was my coffee.

“Go ahead.” I pushed it toward him. He took a sip, handed it back, said carefully, “Was Bernice expecting you to bring a boyfriend or something?”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Ted’s demeanor. The place, the music, the champagne …”

“Because he knew he’d be proposing every five minutes. He’s the type that goes for the grand gesture.”

“I sensed they were expecting it to be a foursome.” And more softly: “I guess we all felt awkward.”

Well, I said. Well, that’s their problem. I told Bernice a hundred times I was bringing a friend. Apparently that concept is foreign to her. Males are not friends in her book. Males are dates, period.

Dwight fingered the cup but didn’t pick it up. “So she did see me as a date?”

“Well,” I said, “you were, more or less.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Dwight—” I began.

“And she wasn’t too thrilled.”

“Bernice is completely self-absorbed. All she talks about is should she marry Ted or shouldn’t she. She woke me up at six this morning to tell me he’s only proposing so he can sleep with her and then it turns out he’s in bed next to her. If she had any thoughts about my taste in friends, she didn’t share them with me.” I folded my empty potato chip bag into halves, then quarters, as if something important rested on the sharpness of my creases.

He stood up slowly, threw his balled-up lunch bag neatly across the room into the open barrel. The grace of his set shot surprised me. He smiled down at me and said, “Liar.” I watched him collect the rest of his trash and reassemble the thermos; he took my coffee cup and swallowed the rest like a belt of scotch. The huge Adam’s apple dipped; below it, his blue pinstripe shirt was unbuttoned at the neck. A few chest hairs poked through a small hole in his T-shirt. I felt a sudden pull in my gut for no reason—a poignancy I might feel over another kind of man with a tiny rent in his T-shirt and the first glimpse of chest hair. But Dwight’s shirt? Dwight Willamee’s chest hair? It made no sense at all.

“I’ll see you,” he said.

“Coming back tomorrow?” I asked.

He rolled his eyes. “Not until someone dies and gives up a seat.”

It registered as funny, but I didn’t laugh. The Girl Scout cheer and the charitable smile I had for weeks bestowed on Dwight no longer fit.

B
ernice said no to Ted, and he broke it off completely. I fretted about how she had ruined everything; how she’d never grown up. I had argued myself into believing that Ted was some kind of answer.

She began to tell me things: his proposing on their first date; his jealousies; his accusing her of being interested in whatever male guests appeared on the show.

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” I asked.

“It was sweet at first! Harmless little questions about what I did. ‘Tell me what you did today,’ he’d say. Harmless. Then he started with the ‘Is he attractive?’ and ‘Do you like him?’ I went along with that crap! I even started to feel guilty. I had to reassure him that whoever it was wasn’t attractive, no, I didn’t like him—about perfectly nice, attractive men who I could have liked. He would get belligerent—you wouldn’t believe the crap he’d throw at me. ‘Does he have a big prick?’ he asked me after
I had Bobby Orr on the show. You know what I said? I said, ‘I don’t know. I can’t tell by feeling the outside of his pants.’”

I laughed. Bernice said, “Funny, right? Well, he has no sense of humor. He sulked for the rest of the night.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this part before? This is serious crazy stuff. No wonder he’s sixty and proposing on the first date.”

Bernice shrugged. “You hope it’s not permanent, or you attribute it to his being so madly in love he can’t think straight. Because one thing I’ve learned is, Don’t spit in the water. You may have to drink it.”

It was Saturday. We were at Saint Botolph’s in the South End for lunch. Bernice was wearing a huge white shirt over black jersey calf-length pants. We sat quietly, smiled politely as the waitress brought menus. After ordering, I asked softly, “Why is it, do you suppose, that you haven’t met someone you like enough to marry?”

Bernice looked surprised. “I wasn’t selfish enough to put you aside and work on my life,” she said.

I said I didn’t quite understand. She knew where I was, even if she hadn’t made her move yet. Under the circumstances, I hardly took up any of her time.

“After a certain age, I told every man about you. I spilled my guts on first dates to every schmuck I went out with. It scared plenty away. They knew I was a serious person with a cause. I’ll tell you—it separated the men from the boys. Once in a while a guy would act as if he understood my pain. Most of them, nineteen out of twenty, would say, ‘I don’t get it, Bern. You were seventeen years old. You got pregnant, you gave the baby up for adoption instead of ruining your life and probably the kid’s. He probably went to a rich family who’s giving him everything he ever wanted.’

“‘She,’ I’d say. ‘It was a girl.’

“‘Oh,’ they’d say. ‘What kind of music do you like?’ as if you were just a thing I brought up to make conversation.”

“Why
did
you bring me up?” I asked.

“Because you were my theme song. You were the way I announced myself, identified myself. It’s as if I were saying, ‘Here’s what I am all about. If you don’t like it, leave.’ And that’s what made me a success on television, that same attitude: I’m going to talk about what I want to talk about, and if you don’t like it, change the channel.”

After a few moments I said, “I find that hard to believe.”

“What do you find hard to believe?” she asked, crimping her voice to imitate me sounding prissy.

“That you let me get in the way.”

“Then you don’t know me at all.”

“Would you have married Jack Flynn if he hadn’t abandoned you?”

I could see the mild surprise in her eyes, as if Jack Flynn’s name didn’t sound familiar. She said she had been too young then, definitely too young to have been married at seventeen. And now she was too old.

“It’s time people knew about me,” she said over dessert.

“They do,” I said. “You’re semi-famous.”

“Not that part of me. I meant, it’s time people know you found your mother. Your brother, for instance. What have you told him?”

“Nothing yet. I don’t want him getting nervous.”

Bernice withdrew, shrinking back. I knew these withdrawals; had seen her do them driving, smoking, talking. Now conversation stopped; she set her face to the task of eating. Her table manners became exaggerated in their precision. If conversation was to resume, it had to be through my efforts.

“I didn’t mean you weren’t important news,” I tried.

She chewed a tiny bite daintily, long past what was necessary.

“What I meant by nervous was that Freddie took my mother’s death badly. He was there, and he had lived at home. He’s very protective of them. And he might see you as a threat to his own security—the biological mother taking back the child. I’m his only family.”

“You’re thirty-six years old! People worry about biological mothers coming back to get their babies, not grown children!”

“He’s very protective of them,” I repeated.

“They’re dead, for God’s sake.”

I put my dessert fork down and leaned closer across the table. “They lost everyone they loved in the war. Freddie would still see it as a loss for them. He thinks they’re watching over us.”

Bernice smiled a tight, knowing smile. “Well, here it is, finally. The war. I was wondering how long it would take for you to open that can of worms. The precious war. That’s what I’m up against, aren’t I?”

It was my turn to eat and ignore her—difficult because we were sharing one dessert. After a few bites, I lost my resolve. I needed to reprimand her. “That was an unbelievably insensitive thing to say about my parents.”

Bernice shrugged. “At least I riled you up. You’re so goddamn … judicious. Every time I talk to you, I can see how you think before you speak, measuring if it’s going to bring you one step closer to acknowledging me or if it’s going to keep you evermore the Epner—uncommitted, nice and safe.”

I shook my head impatiently throughout her speech.

“I’m talking about what you said, not me. Not the way I act or don’t act. What
you
said about ‘the precious war.’ That’s really the way you think, isn’t it? Some foolish war
in Europe now gives my dead parents an unfair advantage in your tug-of-war over a mutual daughter?”

Bernice said, “I have the utmost compassion for your parents’ ordeal.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I most certainly do. I feel as if I were related to them. I think of them as I would some European cousins I never met. I felt terrible when I heard they were gone. And I certainly feel the bond of having shared a daughter with them. Of course, all that extends to Freddie, too. I view him as a kind of long-lost son.”

“Is this new?” I asked.

“It occurred to me as we were discussing your parents, actually. He’s your brother. You’re my daughter. Of course my heart would go out to him.”

“Have you contacted him?” I asked.

“No.”

“Please don’t try to talk to him before I prepare him.”

“I won’t.”

“I want your word that you won’t call him or write him or make an on-air appeal to him. I mean it.”

Bernice tapped the end of a new cigarette smartly on the table and looked pleased with herself. “And if there’s a medical emergency? If you were lying in a gutter somewhere, unconscious—”

“And I suppose you’d be notified first? Yours is the first name on my Medic Alert bracelet?”

“Can’t you have a hypothetical discussion? You can be so damned literal.”

I leaned closer and enunciated carefully. “Don’t call Freddie. I’ll tell him soon.”

“Life is unpredictable,” said Bernice. “I could find myself seated next to him at Legal Sea Foods and he could walk over and ask for my autograph.”

“Don’t test me on this one, Bernice. You’ll lose whatever ground you think you’ve gained.”

“Now she’s threatening me! The little
pisher
is threatening to … what? Stop giving me a weekly audience? Stop letting me feed her at fashionable restaurants? I beg your forgiveness, “Your Highness.”

“Don’t turn this around so that you’re the insulted one. I’m asking you nicely for a simple favor: leave Freddie out of this for now. I’ll eat with you. I’ll be your long-lost daughter. But it’s between you and me.”

We didn’t speak while the waitress removed the dessert plate and refilled our coffee cups. When she was gone, Bernice sat back, toasted me with her coffee cup, toasted our contest, and said, “I’m not worried.”

M
y phone rang the next night during “Masterpiece Theatre.” I was watching “The Flame Trees of Thika” for the second time, thinking how I was definitely growing old if Hayley Mills was playing Elspeth’s mother.

It was a man’s voice saying, “You don’t know me, but I was given your name by Bernice Graves at Channel Four. I’m Bob.”

“Yes?” I said.

“It’s my account. I’m the rep for Digital. She gave me your name.”

I waited for him to state his business.

“Do you hate this as much as I do?” asked Bob.